He turned his head on the pillow.
“This is your nurse. You’re going to have a nurse, Conrad. This is Nurse Gray.”
That must mean he was dying. He had never had a nurse, although Dr. Stanton came once a week, on Thursdays. When had he realized? It had something to do with Dr. Stanton, who came once a week, on—
“Conrad, Nurse Gray is going to give you your pill.”
He looked at Nurse Gray. She was as gray as her name, with gray hair drawn back from her face, and thin gray lips. Even her uniform was gray. She looked formidable—he remembered the word from a spelling test at school. She was walking toward him as silently as a cat, on a nurse’s rubber-soled shoes.
He noticed these things automatically, without interest. What else did he have to think about, except the yews, planted by Randolph Senior to remind him of the forest around his village? They had each been planted, his mother had told him, with the soil from that forest at their roots. Why, Conrad had asked. But she didn’t know. She had never met Randolph Senior, who had died before Conrad’s father had graduated from Princeton, although she remembered Randolph Junior as a grim presence at her wedding. Long after midnight, with the diamonds she had worn to a party still in her hair, she had told him the stories that his father had heard as a child, about bears who became men, and women who lived in trees and married the woodcutters who spared them. Conrad’s father had hated those stories, as much as he hated being the Third and the offices of Slovak Inc., where he never showed up before noon if he could help it. They had given him nightmares. But Conrad had liked them. No more questions, Conrad, his mother had said, and she had brushed his hair back from his forehead, and he had fallen asleep—
“Nurse, if you have everything—”
“Yes, Madam. I see that the patient has water in his carafe.”
She was holding it in the palm of her hand, a small red pill the size of a button. That was it, of course. He had walked down the hall to the bathroom, the night his bedside carafe was empty—he could still walk, then—and heard them in what had been his mother’s sitting room and was now hers.
“It happens often enough. I had a patient, a woman, who collapsed after her fiancé’s death. She spent three years in bed before they called me in. I fixed her up, of course.”
“Was she pretty?” Conrad had never heard her so—simpering. That was the word. He had found that one in the dictionary.
“Is my little girl worried?” There were noises he could not identify, noises like a cat lapping at a bowl of milk, until he realized, with disgust, that they were kisses. “There’s nothing to worry about. You’re the only patient I’ve ever fallen in love with. And you know what’s coming, don’t you? In six months, seven, who knows—no more than a year. You don’t mind waiting a year? It’s so much safer that way. Then we can have everything we wanted, together. Everything we ever wanted, baby. You’ll have diamonds to put in your hair, just like your sister.” Then there were more kisses.
“Your pill, Conrad,” said Nurse Gray. She held it in the palm of her hand. When had it occurred to him that the pill might be poisoned? Perhaps because it was red, like a stop sign. Red meant stop, it meant danger. And once—yes, this was part of it, once Aunt Susan had left a bottle of pills on his bedside table, and he had seen that they were prescribed by Dr. Stanton. But how could he keep himself from swallowing the pill? Aunt Susan always gave it to him herself, and watched until he swallowed. He tried to think of a way, but the clouds drifted in and he could not think clearly.
Nurse Gray had closed her hand. Why, when she wanted Conrad to take the pill? His hand was already halfway to hers, reaching for it. She opened her hand again. The pill was still there, in her palm, but it was—how could it be?—white. He took it automatically and put it into his mouth. Aunt Susan, standing at the foot of the bed, had seen nothing. Before he swallowed it, he tasted—sugar.
Aunt Susan let out a small sigh, and her beads clinked as her hand fumbled nervously among them. “Nurse Gray will be staying with us, Conrad. You must do everything she says. She’s here to make you well.”
Nurse Gray, looking as formidable as ever, nodded once, then turned and followed Aunt Susan out of the room.
Conrad listened for footsteps. Aunt Susan must not find him sitting on the window seat. Or even Nurse Gray, because could he be sure, absolutely sure, that she was on his side? For a week now, she had turned the red pills into white, the bitter into sweet. But without a word for him, without a smile even. Slowly, over the past week, the clouds had dissipated, and he had begun to think. To think! How wonderful that was. He had never realized before how wonderful it was, simply to think. And to plan.
But what could he plan? He knew that there was money. What else was Aunt Susan in this for? And where there was money, there were lawyers. But if he found them and said, “My Aunt Susan is poisoning me because she wants the money for herself,” they would not believe him. No one believed you when you were twelve years old, no matter how precocious you were—another spelling word, and besides the headmaster had used it, after looking at his IQ test. In fact, the more precocious you were, the less they believed you, because they assumed you were imaginative—another word the headmaster had used—and made things up. Not that lawyers would particularly be convinced by Aunt Susan. But they would absolutely be convinced by Dr. Stanton, because he was a psychiatrist, and people were convinced by psychiatrists. Conrad wasn’t sure why, but he knew they were.
Aunt Susan had sent away Mrs. Martin, the housekeeper, who might have helped him, and Janet, the maid, who probably would not have. She had looked like a rabbit, and was always rubbing her nose. She would have been too scared of Aunt Susan. But anyway, he didn’t know where they had gone. Which brought the issue back to Nurse Gray, because it was Dr. Stanton who had suggested a nurse.
“And how is our patient?” he had asked yesterday morning. It had been the day of his weekly visit.
“Much the same, Doctor,” said Nurse Gray in a disapproving voice. Conrad suspected that she would have sounded equally disapproving if she had said that he would make a full recovery, or be dead by that afternoon.
“Then we must work hard to make him better,” said Dr. Stanton, smiling in a way that showed his teeth. He had very straight and even teeth. “Let’s take a look at you, Conrad.”
He had anticipated this, had thought of ways to convince Dr. Stanton that he was still as sick as he had been a week ago, but his heart was beating and he could feel sweat on his palms. If he could imagine the clouds, drifting in front of his eyes—
“I’ll sit him up for you, Doctor,” said Nurse Gray. She was pulling him up, pulling up the pillows behind him. Had someone opened the window? No, she had breathed on his face. He was cold, cold, and the clouds had come again, he was not imagining them, they surrounded him like a gray wall, and suddenly he was not afraid that Dr. Stanton would find out.
It had been then, while Nurse Gray had left the room to fetch her book. Dr. Stanton was packing his bag, and Aunt Susan was standing beside him, and he said to her, “That’s strange, it’s working faster than I thought. He’s got another month or two, maybe.”
Aunt Susan said, “I can’t thank you enough for recommending Nurse Gray. She’s so respectful. And reliable! When Mary was in high school, she had influenza, and we had to hire a nurse. You can’t imagine. The woman drank. She positively reeked of whiskey. And when she left—my mother dismissed her as soon as Mary looked at all well—we discovered that Mama’s cameo was missing, and a hundred dollars. Where did you find her?”
“Where does anyone find nurses?” said Dr. Stanton. “Someone or other recommended her. Probably a patient of mine. You know how nurses move around. This one seems less talkative than most, thank goodness.”
And that was when, as they were walking out of the room, leaving Conrad lying alone on the pillow, they had mentioned Cousin Ralph.
“Another letter came yesterday. He keeps writing,” said Aunt Susan, “askin
g to see the boy.”
“What sort of person is he?” asked Dr. Stanton.
“Oh, terrible, just like Randolph,” said Aunt Susan. “I met him once, at Mary’s wedding. He and Randolph were hanging on to each other, equally drunk. Later, he sang one of those fraternity songs with a lampshade on his head.”
“What did you tell him?” They were outside the door now, and Conrad could barely hear them.
“The same thing. That the doctor had said no visitors.”
“Quite right. And so I do.”
So someone remembered him, someone was trying to see him. Conrad remembered Cousin Ralph playing the piano and singing a song he wasn’t supposed to hear—at least, his mother had sent him to bed. His mother, telling him stories—but he wasn’t going to think about that. He rubbed his eyes, hard. He didn’t know how much faith to have in Cousin Ralph. But once again the clouds were beginning to dissipate, and for the first time he did not feel completely alone.
Now he was sitting on the window seat, looking out at the snow. In the garden, the graves of the three Randolphs stood together, as the Randolphs had never stood while alive. Snow swirled around the yew trees. He breathed on the window.
How things had changed, since the last time he had breathed on this window—when he had realized that his cold was not getting better, was in fact getting worse, and that Dr. Stanton was somehow responsible—and he had written the word “HELP” on the pane with his finger. He breathed on the window again, turning it a translucent white. The word reappeared. It had been there, invisible, all along. Was Nurse Gray there to help him, or not?
Startled, he pressed his nose to the window. Surely he had seen her, walking between the yews, with snow on her shoulders? No, it was the wind, making the snow whirl up, like a whirlpool but in reverse. No, it was Nurse Gray after all, looking straight up at him. Like one of the yews herself, against the snow.
By the time she entered the room, he was under the covers.
Nurse Gray often read to herself, from a green book. Once, she had left it on the bedside table, and Conrad had looked at the spine: The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. She read to herself in an undertone, not loud enough for Aunt Susan to hear in her sitting room, but loud enough so that Conrad could hear her. Most of the poems were boring, but listening helped him lie silently through the long hours, thinking and planning—or trying to, because he had not come up with a plan yet, other than running away, and where was he going to go, in the snow, in his pajamas?
But there was a poem she had read several times already that he liked. It was about a Chief—Conrad imagined him with eagle feathers in a braid of black hair—who had been put in prison. But his friends were coming to free him. “Live and take comfort,” went the poem.
Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee:
air, earth, and skies:
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee. Thou hast great allies . . .
Conrad liked that even the wind was going to help free the Chief, probably by blowing down the prison walls. But it reminded him that he, Conrad, was also imprisoned, and made him wish that he had great allies. He couldn’t call Cousin Ralph a great ally. If he had sent Aunt Susan another letter, Conrad had not heard of it. And Nurse Gray did nothing, day after day, but give him white pills, and look at him disapprovingly, and read from her book.
Where was she now? She had said something about a cup of tea, and he was lying alone in the gray light, with the snow falling outside. It had been falling for days. And suddenly, for the first time since he had caught that cold and been confined to bed, he felt like screaming, so that Aunt Susan would hear it, so that the sound of it would echo through the house and out into the garden—evidence, although he did not realize it, like the ache in his legs, that he was healthier than he had been for a long time.
“You! Did you let him into this house?” Aunt Susan shouting, somewhere downstairs. And then a door slamming.
“Calm down, Susan. I know he’s sick. I just want to see him. I won’t even wake him up.”
“Get out, get out! And don’t expect me to give you a reference.”
“Cousin Ralph,” said Conrad. How hoarse he sounded. It was the first thing he had said for weeks. “He’s not my cousin really,” he said to Nurse Gray, “just a friend of Dad’s. But we used to go fishing together, when my Dad—” Was alive. And where had she come from? She had not been there a moment ago.
Nurse Gray held out her hand. In it was a plastic bottle, filled with pills: red as a fire truck, as a rose.
“Show him,” she said. “They’re not what they’re supposed to be.” As disapproving as ever.
“Cousin Ralph, Cousin Ralph,” shouted Conrad as he ran down the stairs in his pajamas. “Help me, I’m being poisoned by Aunt Susan and Dr. Stanton!” And then his face was pressed against a wool coat, wet with melted snow, and Cousin Ralph was saying “Hey, now, what are you doing out of bed? You’re not even wearing slippers. What would Mrs. Martin say? You know she wrote to me, asking how you were, and I didn’t know what to write back. Is this any way to treat an invalid, Susan?”
The crocuses were just beginning to open. They grew, blue and purple and yellow, around the gravestones, although the ground was still covered with snow.
“What do you think will happen to Aunt Susan?” asked Conrad.
“Depends on what the jury decides,” said Cousin Ralph. “She’ll probably be sent to one of those women’s prisons. Those pills of yours—you know, that doctor Trevor and Callahan hired, the expert witness? Told me they’re used to knock out dogs. Hey, Conrad, is Trevor treating you well? Because if he’s not— I mean, he’s giving you an allowance and all that, right?”
“He’s great. I mean, he’s giving me whatever I want. I don’t need that much, mostly books. And a chess set. I’m in the chess club this year.”
“Good. I mean, for you. Not a game I ever understood. Your Dad and I—we weren’t much for intellectual games. Give us a soccer ball. But anyway, if you need anything, just let me know, OK?”
Conrad nodded and kicked his toe into the earth beside Randolph Senior, After His Labors He Rests. “So, I’m been meaning to ask,” although he hadn’t quite known how. “Who did let you into the house? Someone must have, right? I mean, the door must have been locked.”
Cousin Ralph stopped by Randolph Junior, He Rests in the Lap of the Lord, and put his hands in his pockets. “There was someone, and if I could find her again—” And, unbelievably, he blushed. “She had this, you know, uniform, that fit her like—well, a glove. And brown hair. She was the prettiest damn— Sorry. And you know, I even asked Stanton who she might have been, though I wanted to spit in his eye the whole time I was doing it. But he said the only other person in the house was a nurse, who must have been sixty.” He kicked the earth, in unconscious imitation.
“The one who disappeared.”
“Right you are, boy genius. Did Trevor tell you? He wanted to call her as a witness, but her room was empty, and none of Stanton’s patients had heard of her though he swore she was recommended. But hey, you probably don’t remember her, after being drugged like a German Shepherd.”
“No, I remember—”
Conrad investigated for himself, wandering around the upstairs rooms while Cousin Ralph walked through the garden, smoking a cigarette. He looked in what must have been her room, but there was no mark of her in it. Not a hairpin on the floor, no reflection of her in the mirror over the dresser. But in his room, the room where he had lain for what had once seemed like forever, he did find something. Already, it seemed to have happened so long ago, and the important things were the dormitories of St. Andrews, covered with ivy in which sparrows nested, and his algebra test, and whether Simon McGreevy would beat him at chess. But he sat on the window seat and read the letters written in the white circle of his breath. Yes, she had left him something.
Powers that will wor
k for thee:
air, earth, and skies.
He did not know what it meant, but she had probably thought it was an explanation, and that was enough.
Cousin Ralph was wearing a yellow crocus in his buttonhole. “Ready, Conrad?”
“Yes, I’m ready,” he said. He ran his fingers over Randolph III and His Wife Mary, At Peace, then turned away from the Randolphs, resting beneath their yews. “Let’s go. I’ll race you to the car!”
A STATEMENT IN THE CASE
Sure, I know István Horvath. We met about a year before Eva died. That’s my wife, Eva. You knew that? Yeah, I figured you were pretty thorough.
It was the year of the blizzard, when snow covered the cars parked on the streets and even the Post Office shut down. I didn’t have to go to work for a week. So one night, I think it was Thursday, Eva says, “Mike, I only have one of the blue pills left.” This was when we still thought the chemo was doing something. When we discovered it wasn’t, she turned her head toward me on the pillow—she was so beautiful, like the day we got married—and said, “Mike, I think the Lord wants me home.” After that, she refused to take the pills. But I couldn’t throw them out. Every morning I opened the medicine cabinet, and there they were, the blue ones, the orange ones that made her throw up, the green ones that made her hair fall out, the purple ones that caused constipation. When she died, I flushed them down the toilet. But you don’t want to hear about Eva. I was talking about the day I met István Horvath.
Well, there she was saying there were no more blue pills, and how was I going to get to Walgreens? The snow was up to my armpits, and the subway wasn’t running. Then Eva said, “What about that store around the corner?” Now, we always went to Walgreens. You know the guy in Alabama who sold aspirin as that stuff you take for cholesterol? So we were always careful. We never went to the store around the corner. For one thing, the sign said Apothecary, which looked kind of foreign, and we wanted our pills one hundred percent American. For another, the front of the store was kind of dirty. You know, like nobody washed the windows.
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